Mary, Mary, quite contrary - and in code

The Da Vinci Code has as its premise that Mary Magdalene is seated on Christ's right in Da Vinci's The Last Supper amd is depicted in The Virgin of the Rocks.

Debbie Gordon opened the conspiracy thriller The Da Vinci Code one evening, and by 3am found herself peering at online photos of The Last Supper in a totally new way.

Is that really Mary Magdalene depicted to the right of Christ? While most scholars say it is a clean-shaven Apostle John, it is simply the possibility that Mary Magdalene could be seated in the coveted position at the right hand of Christ that has sparked the imagination of readers and theologians alike.

More than 5.5 million copies of Dan Brown's book have been sold around the world since it was published last April and its premise is a prime topic in book clubs, religious classes and water-cooler debates. The murder mystery is a fictional search for the Holy Grail, while offering provocative twists on more orthodox, patriarchal images of God.

"It made me think about things; it talks about reclaiming the feminine mystique, the sacred feminine," said Gordon, a product of a traditional Catholic upbringing in California who is now facing questions about the role of women in the church from her 17-year-old daughter, Amy, who also read the novel. "She wanted to know, is it really true that women were treated unfairly? I think the book was a good jumping-off point . . . for a good conversation between me and my daughter."

Gordon is among a growing wave of Catholics and non-Catholics who are using the novel as a stimulus for exploring their faith and the role of women in religion. Intrigued parishioners from St Bernardine of Siena Catholic Church in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where the Gordons worship, for example, plan to attend a panel discussion next week sponsored by neighbouring synagogue Temple Aliyah.

"Anything that gets people talking about God and the church is a good thing," said Father Robert McNamara, the priest at St Bernardine's. Rabbi Rachel Bovitz, of Temple Aliyah, said she suggested the panel to dispel errors in the book about both Judaism and Christianity, but also to explore the role of women in both faiths.

"For centuries we have recognised, starting with Genesis in the Torah, that God is neither male nor female," Bovitz said. "[The feminine aspect] is the presence of God we feel among ourselves."

Elizabeth Johnson, a professor at Fordham University in New York, and other theologians have spent years studying feminine images of God and women's influence on faith. For them, the popularity of the novel is an indication that those themes are beginning to resonate on a larger stage. "It's like a frozen lake where now the ice is cracking in all sorts of places, as if something is coming from underneath, like springtime," said Johnson, whose 1992 scholarly work She Who Is is widely considered among the best of the genre.

The Da Vinci Code has also sparked a new desire for the church to engage in a more honest dialogue with its members about its past and present. "In light of the sex abuse scandal, most in the Catholic Church would not put it past the Vatican to suppress [controversial issues]," Johnson said. "People say, 'This is not beyond the realm of reason.' "

But for many other theologians, the hyperbole, historical inaccuracies, sloppy scholarship and the presentation of church heresies as truth make any serious consideration of the book appalling. "There are people who have left the church over this book," said Thomas Rausch, a Jesuit priest and theology professor at Loyola Marymount University. Rausch hasn't read The Da Vinci Code and said he was "frustrated" at how the novel has been embraced by Catholics and others who are ready to accept fiction as truth especially when they haven't read the extraordinary body of Catholic scholarship that would discount it. "You're dealing with ignorance on a lot of levels," said Rausch, the author of Catholicism in the Third Millennium.

At the heart of Rausch's objection is the novel's suggestion of a secret knowledge about the church particularly concerning an alleged relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene held by a select few, and which church leaders have kept hidden for centuries. "This stuff is crazy; it's wacko," Rausch said. "It's not that it was hidden or repressed. It was recognised as marginal." Rausch said he understood the value of feminist scholarship and the hunger for more transparency in the church, but added, "I don't know any serious feminist who claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married" an assertion central to the plot of the book.

David Scholer, a professor of the New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, said it was important to reclaim Mary Magdalene's role as the "Apostle to the Apostles", but was problematic to speculate on events that were historically unwarranted. "Was Jesus married to a female follower? . . . There's not a shred of evidence that he was," Scholer said. "I always tell my students, what's possible is almost anything. What you have to ask yourself is, what is probable?"

Karen King, a professor of church history at Harvard University and author of The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, concurred there was no historical indication of such a marriage. The reason, she said, was that Mary was identified by her own town of Magdala, not by her husband's, as would have been the case in the ancient world had she and Jesus been married.

But Mary Magdalene also was not a prostitute a distortion promoted by an early church leader which still lingers in popular culture despite scholarly efforts to correct the error. "I think the question that has to be asked is why (the book) is touching so many people," said King, an Episcopalian, whose latest research is based on lost texts discovered in Egypt in 1896.

"It has to do with people really being suspicious. If Mary Magdalene is not a prostitute, then what else is the truth?"

King and others have written about Mary Magdalene's role as an apostle akin to Peter, the leader of Christ's disciples. There is considerable theological agreement that Mary has a valid apostolic claim based on her witness to Christ's resurrection and subsequent instruction to spread the gospel.

The Vatican becomes nervous when the feminist critique becomes too sharp, particularly when it threatens Peter as the "rock" upon which the church was to be built, said Michelle A. Gonzalez, a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University.

"It's a work of fiction, but it does offer an entry point for Christians to imagine the role of the feminine in the divine," said Gonzalez, who read the book because she was constantly being asked whether or not she had.

"It pushes people to re-imagine how they understand God and Jesus, and that's something people have done throughout the ages. You see that in art and church teaching. Anything that opens people's imaginations to really . . . think about how they understand God, that's ultimately a good thing."

Paula McDonald, a Catholic and psychologist who lives in California, said it was not the Mary-Jesus marriage subplot, which she totally discounted, that was attractive to readers.

"The Da Vinci Code introduces to some people for the first time the feminine image of God. That's very powerful and very useful," she said.

Feminist Christian theology emerged in the US in the 1960s, but has come of age only in the past few decades.

Broadly, it means looking at the Holy Trinity as well as the women of the Bible, through the "eyes and voices" of women as a way to more fully understand the divine.

God in patriarchal societies is called Father, but Johnson said that evolved from a time when God was seen more through qualities of creator, protector and love than of gender.

God, for example, was referred to as "Father" just four times in the earliest gospel, but 120 times in the last, Johnson said.

Jesus, while male, speaks in tender language, and identifies himself with wisdom.

"The Scripture is very clear that God is neither male nor female, but God's image in the church is male," McDonald said. "That leaves many women without a God image that includes us."

The novel claims

Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code blends fiction, myth and fact into a best-selling novel that has left millions of readers curious. Among the more controversial claims:

The Holy Grail: the mythical symbol is believed to be the chalice Christ drank from at the Last Supper. In the book, it is a symbol for the "divine feminine mystique", specifically Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene: wrongly depicted for centuries as a prostitute, Mary was an early disciple of Christ, who was witness to his resurrection and instructed by him to spread the news. Scholars believe she never married and may have travelled to France after the resurrection. In the book, Mary is believed to have married Christ and borne him a daughter, hence her role as a vessel or the Holy Grail.

The Last Supper: completed about 1497, the painting by Leonardo Da Vinci depicts Christ and his 12 apostles, just after Jesus announces that one of them will betray him. The book theorises that the apostle seated at Christ's right hand is Mary Magdalene, not John, and that the lack of a chalice on the table means the Holy Grail is a person rather than a cup.

The Virgin of the Rocks: painted about 1485, this Da Vinci work is said to depict the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, the baby Jesus and an angel. The book maintains that the woman depicted is Mary Magdalene, and the kneeling child is her offspring with Jesus.